5th September 1969, and Gitel Bargman is about to attend a party to celebrate her 33rd birthday - although to her it is hardly cause for celebration. She is wracked with guilt for simply being alive. In 1941 she survived the mass killings at Kovno, Lithuania, while the majority of her family didn’t.Attractive, intelligent and witty, Gitel is a successful career violinist living in Kuybyshev, USSR. To the outsider, Gitel has everything. But Gitel hides a secret. She is a haunted woman: haunted not only by painful memories of the past, but also by the ghosts of her two sisters who died when she, by a mere quirk of fate, was a Holocaust survivor.She lives in the past, Gitel cannot embrace her future. To love, and to be loved in return, remains an impossible dream. At the birthday party, thrown for her by her surviving brother Chaim, she meets Lev Rosenzweig. He also has a disturbing past. Reluctantly and painfully, Lev and Gitel try to find love in each other.